Privacy and cookies policy

If you've come here to opt in or out of cookies, you can do that straight away by clicking here. If you're not sure what cookies are or what they do, please read on.

Quick summary

Explainthatstuff.com does not collect or store any personal information about you at any time.

Explainthatstuff.com does not track or trace your web browsing.

Explainthatstuff.com has tried to keep its use of services that store cookies on your computer to an absolute minimum:

Our own domain, explainthatstuff.com, stores only one persistent (long-lasting) cookie on your computer: to record the fact that you have clicked our cookie consent button. It does not store any personally identifying information. You can opt in or out of ("withdraw your consent" for) this cookie at any time.
We use essential, short-lived (session) cookies to make our web server work efficiently. You cannot opt out of these because our server will not work without them, but they do not store any personally identifying information.

We do not use analytical cookies (Google Analytics, Statcounter, and so on) to produce statistical reports about users. We use web server statistics instead.

We do not use sharing widgets, which place (third-party) cookies on your computer and track your web browsing. We use our own simple sharing links instead, which operate like ordinary web links, do not track you, and do not use cookies.

Our site is completely free to use and has to run advertising or it wouldn't exist, but
we run the minimum amount of advertising that we possibly can and keep it as unobtrusive
as possible. Our advertisers use (third-party) cookies to help them serve more relevant and useful advertisements, and may store them on your computer. We do not have access to these cookies or any information they may contain.
You can opt in or out of ("withdraw your consent" for) these cookies at any time.

Our website includes social-networking buttons so you can share things you like with your friends. If you belong to a social networking site, please be aware that it may be using cookies to track you as you visit this site and other sites on the web. We do not have access to these cookies or any information they may contain.

If you send us feedback about this site, we will keep and act on your comments, but promptly delete your email address.

That was the short version. Please read on if you'd like a fuller explanation—and for details of how to remove unwanted cookies from your computer.

What are cookies?

When you look at websites, text, graphics, videos, and other computer data moves from a web server (which stores the website you're looking at and "serves" it up to you) to your web browser (the program, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, or whatever you use to surf the Web). There is no easy way for a web browser to remember things about you as you move from page to page, which makes life difficult if you want to do something like putting a product in a shopping cart (trolley), select a particular size of text for the pages you're looking at, sign in to a website for a personalized experience, and so on.

That's where cookies come in. Cookies are small files that websites can store on your computer to help them remember things about you. Some cookies (known as session cookies) stay on your computer only for very short periods of time (typically, until you close your browser); others, known as persistent cookies, may stay there for years. Some cookies, known as first-party cookies, are set by the websites you visit; others are set by services that those websites rely on (for example, advertisements, statistical tracking programs, social networking widgets and so on)—and they're known as third-party cookies. Cookies like this can be used to track a web user's progress as they move from one website to another, although they generally do so anonymously (they don't usually contain personally identifiable information). Nevertheless, the use of cookies does raise understandable concerns about privacy. If you are worried about this, you can set up your web browser to accept or reject certain kinds of cookies and you can inspect or delete the cookies it contains at any time. We explain how to do this below.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies for three things: to improve your experience of our site, to serve relevant personalized advertising, and for social media.

Cookies that improve your experience of our site

Our website uses only one persistent (long-lasting) cookie (called
cookieconsent_dismissed): to record the fact that you have seen our cookie warning and consented to it by clicking "OK." This cookie doesn't contain any personally identifying information and (for your convenience) is stored for one year from the time when you give your consent. Our website doesn't use any other "persistent" (long-lasting) cookies and doesn't use any cookies to track you or collect personal information about you.

Although we do not generally use persistent cookies, our server will usually store one or two temporary (session) cookies on your computer. These are essential cookies that help our server work properly, but they don't contain any personally
identifying information. They expire at the end of your session (usually when you close your browser):

Depending on which pages you're looking at, the server may store a simple cookie called PHPSESSID on your computer purely for the duration of your session. PHPSESSID is a technical mechanism that helps the server ensure you can browse our site efficiently when there are multiple people viewing the site at the same time.
It's essentially a random string of letters and numbers that the server assigns to you so it can remember you, as you hop from page to page, and not mix up your session with other people's.
This is purely an internal server mechanism: we don't use this cookie to track you in any way whatsoever
and it will expire and be deleted from your computer as soon as you close your web browser.

Our site is hosted on a high-performance cloud grid, using many servers. It may store a temporary cookie called DYNSRV, which helps the load balancer (a mechanism that spreads the load evenly across all the servers) to figure out and remember which server is sending pages to you—so the site is served to you faster.

Photo: The three cookies used by our website. Of these, only cookieconsent_dismissed is a persistent cookie that lasts beyond your current browsing session. You can also see the typical contents of a PHPSESSID cookie: it's a simple random identifier that contains no personal information about you. The cookie expires at the end of your session, which usually means when you close your browser.

None of these cookies (cookieconsent_dismissed, PHPSESSID, or DYNSRV) collect or store any personal information about you or track your behavior for marketing purposes in any way whatsoever.

Cookies that help us serve relevant, personalized advertising

Although our own server does not set persistent cookies (other than for cookie consent), please be aware
that some persistent third-party cookies are set when you visit our website. Our site runs advertisements on most pages; it is a completely free website and if it didn't run advertising, it would simply not exist. The advertising partners we work with use what are known as persistent, third-party cookies to help them serve up relevant, targeted advertisements that they believe may match your interests, and they may share them with their own partner companies. (Although you might raise an eyebrow at this use of cookies, we believe it is better that advertisers show you things you might find interesting or useful than completely random advertisements.) We have no control over these third-party cookies. We do not see or have access to any information they may store or collect. They pass directly between your computer and the servers run by our advertisers.

Briefly, third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads to you based on your prior visits to our website.
Google's main advertising cookie is called DoubleClick. Google's use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve personalized ads to you based on your visit to our site and/or other sites you have previously visited on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DoubleClick cookie for interest-based advertising by visiting
Google's Ads Settings page.
If you want to permanently opt-out of the DoubleClick cookie, you can install a
browser plugin
on your browser, which works on Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer,
but you will need to do that for each computer and web browser that you use
(if you use more than one).
You can learn more about how Google safeguards your privacy by visiting the Google Privacy Policy website.

The cookies of other third-party vendors or other ad networks may also be used to serve ads on our site
as part of Google's wider advertising network, and you can opt out of these cookies too by visiting
www.youronlinechoices.com (Europe)
or aboutads.info.

Cookies for social media

Like pages on most other modern websites, most of the pages on our site now include links to social networking and bookmarking sites (specifically, the Facebook Like button and Google +1 button) to help people remember our articles and share them with their friends. Please be aware that, depending on how you are signed into these services, they might be using cookies to track websites or pages you visit. No such information is collected by our own site and none of the information that may be collected by social networking sites is available to us: it passes directly between your computer and the social networking site(s) you belong to.
If you have concerns about privacy and social networking bookmarks, please visit the privacy pages of the sites or services you use:

As of 2017, we no longer use the "official" Twitter tweet button; the "Tweet" buttons on our pages are just ordinary web links to Twitter. Although they look like the official button, they don't use cookies in any way and don't allow Twitter to track your browsing.

EU General Data Protection Regulations

As explained above, this website does not collect or store any personal information about you.
It fully informs you about cookie use and allows you to consent to the use of cookies or opt-out of cookie use
just as easily at any time. We have reviewed our obligations and believe the site is compliant with the EU GDPR, which is effective from
May 25, 2018.

We will not keep, sell, or otherwise misuse your email address

We value feedback from our readers very highly: we're trying to improve this site all the time and your thoughts and suggestions are invaluable to us. If you send us feedback or comments, we keep them and act on them, if that's appropriate. We give you the option of sending feedback anonymously, though (to prevent abuse), your IP address
and computer hostname are sent to us at the same time, along with basic details of which browser, operating system, and so on that you're using (that helps us if you've commented about formatting problems, mobile-device usability, or things like that).
If you do choose to send us your email address, we may use it to send you a reply. We don't use it for any other purpose, we don't record it anywhere, and we don't retain it. If we send you a reply, we delete that promptly too, so there is no record of your email address anywhere on our web server or email server. When we store your feedback, we delete your name, email address, IP address, and host name; only your comments and suggestions are stored.

When you email us or submit feedback, we may use Google's reCAPTCHA technology to help check your input
and prevent automated spam replies. This use of reCAPTCHA is subject to the
Google Privacy Policy and
Terms of Use.

Opting out

We don't offer a way for you to opt-out of having your information collected or a way to remove your personal information from our records, because we don't collect any information about you.

Photo: You'll find the "Don't Track" option in Firefox under the Privacy options. You can also change the "History" setting underneath so Firefox deletes all records of your current session when you exit your browser.

Site statistics and server logs

Unlike many other websites, we don't obsessively run analytics software to track our visitors; occasionally
we run Google Analytics for a day or two to help us diagnose technical problems, but we don't have it switched
on the whole time tracking everything you do. We do not even use routine server logging: our cloud grid server has logging disabled by default, so we don't track or trace your web browsing in any way. We enable server logging only when we have technical issues that need fixing. On those rare occasions, through our website hosting company, we run a general statistical package called AWStats to show up daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly patterns and trends. It doesn't log any personal information about you or how you use our site: it simply tells us general things about how many visitors we have, which pages they look at, and so on. We don't retain web server logs or the detailed information they contain, so the way you use our site is not tracked or traced.

Acknowledgements

Our pop-up cookie-consent warning script was supplied by
Silktide, and slightly modified by us on July 29, 2015 so it serves faster from our own server. It's released under the GNU General Public License Version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Let us know

We hope this answers any concerns you may have about privacy and reassures you that we take the issue seriously. If you have any further queries, please don't hesitate to contact us
using our email form.